A Mount Hawthorn café built from recycled bricks and WA natives

Perth's inner-north café strip has a particular warmth to it, and the newest arrival on a quiet Mount Hawthorn corner leans into that feeling. Reclaimed brickwork now lines the front façade, salvaged in part from a 1960s house in Bayswater that was being demolished. Around it, kangaroo paw, banksia and a fringe of low native grasses soften the boundary wall.

The owners worked with a small Perth studio drawn together by a shared interest in low-impact hospitality design. They wanted something honest: materials that looked like themselves and a planting scheme that did not rely on reticulated lawn through the long, dry summers that shape how this city is built.

What opened quietly in late spring is being talked about less as a coffee venue and more as an accidental case study in what suburban retrofit can look like in a drying climate. Customers walk in for the coffee and stay for the materials.

It is also the kind of project that quietly complicates the conversation around hospitality design in Perth. The suburb is saturated with venues competing on aesthetic, and most lean hard on imported materials and imported ideas. This one is doing something different, even if the people behind it would never put it that way.

A corner site with two streets and a jacaranda

The café occupies a former dry cleaner on a Mount Hawthorn intersection familiar to locals for its Saturday dog walkers and the slow drift of traffic along Scarborough Beach Road nearby. The original shopfront had been amended so many times over the decades that almost nothing of the early street wall survived intact.

The new frontage pulls that wall back into order. Recycled face bricks, sourced from demolition sites in the Perth metro area, form a low planter at the entry and climb to the awning line. They arrive in a warm, irregular red-brown that picks up the jacaranda across the road when it flowers in November.

Inside the threshold, the original ceiling height has been left exposed. A new clerestory window punched through the rear wall pulls northern light across the seating, which matters in a suburb oriented east-west. The footprint is modest: 70 square metres inside, plus a sheltered courtyard along the eastern boundary.

Where the bricks came from

Almost every brick in the build is second-hand. The builder worked with a salvage yard in Osborne Park that specialises in demolition material from inner Perth and the inner-eastern suburbs, where post-war housing stock is steadily being replaced by townhouses.

Sorting was the slow part. The team spent two weekends at the yard hand-picking bricks by colour, rejecting anything with hairline cracking or mortar damage. Of roughly 4,500 bricks pulled, around 3,200 made the final cut for the walls. The remainder were used as paving on the rear courtyard, where they sit on a sand bed without grout, allowing rainwater to pass between them. That detail matters in a city where the Water Corporation and local councils are increasingly attentive to on-site infiltration as the climate shifts.

The pace of work pushed the build a little over its original timeline, but the visual texture is hard to replicate any other way. One local supplier working in this kind of circular economy will be part of the wine and design exhibitor showcase later this year.

Native planting for a drying climate

The landscaping was drawn up in collaboration with a West Leederville garden designer who has spent the last decade working almost exclusively with Western Australian species. The brief was tight: nothing that would need supplementary watering once established, nothing toxic to local birdlife, and nothing that would drop hard litter onto the footpath where it could become a hazard or a maintenance complaint.

Around fourteen species are in the ground, layered from low groundcovers at the front edge through to taller shrubs against the rear fence. A few of the larger grass trees were transplanted from a property in the Perth Hills being cleared for a rural subdivision, an increasingly common source as rural blocks change hands in the ranges east of the city.

For visitors who want to see how this kind of approach translates to a residential scale, the Perth Hills renovation feature walks through a much larger version of the same thinking, on a block that had to deal with the same slope, the same soil and the same relentless summer sun.

Plants in the ground include:

Working within Australian standards

Australia has a stricter commercial building environment than many people realise. Any new fit-out in Western Australia has to satisfy the National Construction Code, the relevant Australian Standards, and, depending on the local government area, heritage and streetscape overlays that govern what can and cannot change at the front of a building. In the City of Stirling, which covers Mount Hawthorn, planning policy encourages the retention of existing built form and the use of materials that age gracefully. Recycled bricks tick both boxes.

The acoustic treatment inside had to be carefully detailed, because cafés sit under a different section of the NCC to residential construction. The team used a combination of timber slats over compressed wool batts to keep reverberation down without importing foam or synthetic finishes. Insulation choices also had to factor in bushfire attack level, even though the site is well inside the metro area. That is the reality of designing in a country where bushfire provisions now shape decisions in many suburbs.

For practitioners who want to dig further into the regulatory and material questions this kind of project raises, the broader industry program covers retrofit and adaptive reuse in the Perth context, with sessions aimed squarely at local architects and builders.

Element Recycled brick (this project) New brick (typical alternative)
Source Demolition sites across metro Perth Brickworks plant in Middle Swan
Embodied carbon (rough estimate) Around half that of new Industry baseline
Installed cost per m² Higher upfront, slower to lay Lower upfront, faster to lay
Visual character Irregular, weathered, varied tone Uniform, factory-fresh
Maintenance after handover Very low Very low
Distance from site Within about 15 km Within about 20 km

Inside the room

Walking in, the first thing you notice is the wall on the left. It runs the full length of the seating area and is built from the same recycled bricks as the façade, but laid in a stack bond that emphasises the variation in tone and texture between every unit. Up close, each brick carries its own slight history of mortar and weathering.

Benchtops are concrete with a soft oxide tint, made off-site and craned in through the front opening. The bar is clad in blackbutt from a sustainably certified supplier in the south-west, finished only with a hardwax oil. Nothing on the floor is vinyl. The lighting is warm and deliberately understated: most of it comes from low-hung pendants above the long communal table, with task lighting only where baristas need it most. There are no downlights chasing the ceiling.

Acoustic comfort is the unsung detail that changes how the room feels. Even at the morning rush, conversation stays at conversation level. That alone separates the space from the louder venues along Oxford Street in nearby Leederville, and is the kind of thing customers tend to remember without being able to name.

What it means for Perth's café scene

Mount Hawthorn's café competition is real. Within a kilometre there are at least a dozen specialty coffee venues, most of them in converted houses and shopfronts of a similar vintage to this one. Differentiation tends to come down to fit-out, not to beans.

The team behind this café is not trying to claim a green halo. The owners are open about the trade-offs: recycled bricks are slower to lay, native plants take longer to establish, and the build ran a little over the original budget. Local labour rates and the cost of careful demolition salvage simply do not match the price of new materials on a spreadsheet, although the finished product argues otherwise.

What they have shown, more quietly, is that a suburban hospitality venue in Perth can lean into local material and local ecology without turning the experience into a lecture. Customers notice the bricks because they look right, not because they come with a plaque.

The names behind the project

The architectural work came from a young Perth practice that has built a quiet reputation for residential work across the western suburbs. The landscape design was by an independent designer with a background in restoration ecology. The builder is a small family operation based in Bayswater. The brick salvage came through a yard in Osborne Park, and the timber joinery was made by a one-person workshop in Welshpool.

The coffee is roasted in Osborne Park and the bread is baked a few streets away. For a suburb the size of Mount Hawthorn, that kind of local cluster is part of the appeal. The whole project took about fourteen months from first sketch to opening, longer than a conventional fit-out, but the result reflects that extra time in every joint.

Trades and suppliers involved:

For architects, designers and students working through similar questions of material, climate and place, Contemporary Wine In Design returns later this year with a programme built around exactly these conversations. Tickets are live now and the full speaker line-up will be announced in the months ahead. The exhibitor list and program details are worth a close look for anyone thinking about their next retrofit project, and the team behind this Mount Hawthorn café will be in the room.